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The Day Planner vision

Note: This page has changed from the original version. This is the current vision. You may also view the original vision document

The vision of Day Planner is to create a Day Planner that:
- Is easy to use
- Is simple to learn
- Is consistent
- works offline, does not require an internet connection
- goes out of its way to make sure the user knows about an appointment
- follows the GNOME HIG
- has the features people need, but not more. No bloat, no excessive features
- has a clean, well documented and extendible codebase
- does one thing, and does that well


User interface
The user interface is going to be simple. It should not be bloated like many other planning applications (such as the Mozilla sunbird and Evolution planners). It should follow the GNOME human interface guidelines and use the GTK GUI libraries.

Read-only web interface
Day Planner is able to export to html (read-only). This is possible to do both when X is running and when it isn't. This so that the user can access her or his events from a web interface. Further on perhaps it could be an idea to have an actual web client. This is however not a priority and there is by no means any ETA. when or if this might happen.

Underlying daemon ("the reminder")
The daemon is hidden from view most of the time. The user shouldn't know about it. The daemon takes care of access control (making sure only one client is running at any one time) and running the notification program to notify the user about events. Day Planner shouldn't be running without it. When speaking about the daemon to the user it should be referred to as the "Day Planner reminder".

Underlying notification software
The notification software takes care of making sure the user knows about an event. It displays a GUI pop-up dialog and takes care of the "postpone" button in those dialogs. It writes to all terminals of the user when X is not available. Perhaps it should also be able to notify the user in other ways. This can be achieved by for instance:
Mailing the user

Innovative notification - aka. in a perfect world...
SMS notification is a very interesting option. Sending the user an SMS or MMS with the description and time of the event. This is not currently possible, SMS costs money and there is no good web interface to send it from. This could be solved by using online websites to send free SMS messages, but it would be a very hacky, ugly and time-consuming thing to write and wouldn't really be reliable. Still, this is a vision document, and in a perfect world this would be possible. Perhaps if mobile phones one day get a permanent internet connection we can have a mobile phone client. I doubt it though...

Networking and calendar sharing
Networking
Day Planner has the Day Planner services system which allows you to synchronize with a central server. That server can again generate a web interface for you automatically so that your calendar will always be available. It also allows you to synchronize Day Planner at multiple locations (for instance one at work and one at home). But even with this the calendar is also saved locally and you can make changes without networking which will be uploaded once networking is available.

This system will some time in the future be replaced by a Conduit- based solution. This will allow Day Planner to have much more versatile synchronization, not only limited to the Day Planner services system, but also possibly to online calendars, mobile units and so on.

Calendar sharing As the services will have all of the networking stuff in place, it should be fairly simple to get calendar sharing on that server too. Then we would have to allow the user to make stuff public and private so that not everything is shared (and by default nothing). The user can then grant read-only access to other users.

Internet calendars Day Planner will in the future be able to subscribe to online iCalendars, this will allow users to easily and efficiently keep up to date with interesting dates.

Copyright © Eskild Hustvedt 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2020
Artwork Copyright © Jason Holland 2006
Some parts of the website design used with the permission of Isak Savo
Licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3